Peter Taylor: Complete Stories 1938-1959: The Library of America #298

Description

In a career spanning over half a century, Peter Taylor explored in exquisite detail the dramas, large and small, of a Tennessee gentry struggling with the loss of the old certainties in an Old South becoming new. A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Penn/Faulkner Award and a regular contributor to The New Yorker, he was, in the estimation of Anne Tyler, 'the undisputed master of the short-story form. You could give a creative writing class with no other text but his stories and that class would come out fully educated.'

Peter Matthew Hillsman Taylor (1917-1994) was born in Trenton, Tennessee, and studied with Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom as an undergraduate. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Taylor taught at a number of schools until 1967, when he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, his home for the rest of his life. Best known for his short stories, Taylor also wrote three novels-A Woman of Means (1950), A Summons to Memphis (1986), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning In the Tennessee Country (1994)-and several plays. In 1978 he was awarded the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1993 the PEN/Malamud Award for his lifetime contribution to the art of the short story.

"The undisputed master of the short-story form." --Anne Tyler "Only Eudora Welty has acomplished a body of fiction so rich, durable, and accessible as Taylor's." --Jonathan Yardley "The stories in these volumes define their time and place with an unrivaled precision." --Michael Gorra, in The New York Review of Books